Downton Abbey's Back!

Last year's sleeper hit returns with its deliciously soapy fare and cautionary tale about the underbelly of class politics

If Downton Abbey were a real place, instead of TV fiction, the nasty things that went on there around 1913 wouldn't seem so delicious: frame-ups, putdowns, intrigues among footmen, death during illicit sex. Even so, the British drama—whose first season on PBS's Masterpiece Classic won four Emmys, and whose second begins this month—is bracingly accurate about the far nastier and perfectly licit screwing that sets its plot in motion: the inheritance law called entailment. This ancient bit of sexism, forcing the settlement of great estates on male heirs and swallowing up women's money in the process, is the engine of a plot about a pampered earl with three daughters but no sons. Thanks to the entailment, his title, along with the titular mansion beyond Martha Stewart's dreams, will be lost to (shudder!) a middle-class cousin, unless the earl's eldest can be persuaded to marry the bloke.

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It's at this point you might think Downton Abbey has little to say to us classless, unentailed Americans. But something made it a cult hit here: 6 million U.S. viewers, about as many as watch 30 Rock, gobbled up the first four installments. Could it be that in the overly cozy relationship between our financial and governing elites, in our growing economic stratification, we're actually becoming more like the English a hundred years ago? Ever more incestuous, our politics no longer make strange bedfellows. Everyone's in bed with the usual characters.

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Which is exactly the dead-end insularity that got England's gentry (and thus England) into such a pickle. Downton Abbey is in that sense both nostalgic and cautionary—a winning combination. Alas, the show itself bears the hallmarks of inbreeding, having been spawned from overly close relatives such as Upstairs Downstairs, Gosford Park (for which Downton's creator, Julian Fellowes, won an Oscar), and the collected works of Jane Austen. But if the result is a bit preposterous, so was the world it so entertainingly renders, in which poor maids tied wealthy ladies into painful corsets. The question asked by the first season is how such an impossible social order gets overturned. (Cue World War I.) Season two, and we who enjoy it, will have to answer for what happens once it does.